The Collection:
The Permanent Art Collection
The university’s Permanent Art Collection contains more than 3,000 items — prints, drawings, and paintings in a variety of media, as well as three-dimensional works of various sorts. Holdings include early modern European and American art, with particularly important collections of German Expressionism, Japanese prints, Oceanic artifacts, and ancient and Byzantine coins. Among the artists represented are Frank Brangwyn, Heinrich Campendonk, Hendrik Goltzius, Emily Groom, William Penhallow Henderson, Maxime Maufra, Louise Nevelson, Jan Saenredam, Egon Schiele, and Paul Signac, Selections from the permanent collection are regularly featured in exhibitions in the three galleries of the Wriston Art Center, art history courses routinely incorporate the study of these original works, and students have access to the collections for their research.
The Ottilia Buerger Collection of Ancient and Byzantine Coins
Ottilia M. Buerger, ’38, beginning in the 1950s, assembled a collection of rare coins that is widely regarded as one of the finest in the United States. Guided by the conviction that ancient coins were small and beautiful eyewitnesses to history, Miss Buerger believed that her “baubles,” as she called them, could bring a vivid reality to the past. In 1991 she loaned her collection to Lawrence so that it could be studied by students and faculty. Since then, the collection has been the subject of two major exhibitions at the Wriston Art Center and has been studied by hundreds of art history, classics, and history students. An online version of its catalog has been viewed by over 4.2 million visitors. When Miss Buerger died in 2001, she left instructions for her collection to come to Lawrence, along with a bequest establishing the Ottilia Buerger Professorship in Classical or Medieval Studies.
The La Vera Pohl Collection of German Expressionists
La Vera Pohl (1901-1981) was a Milwaukee artist, museum director, and collector who studied art and art history in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Across a 40-year period, she collected some 220 prints, paintings, and drawings, most of them by early 20th-century German artists — a collection of particular significance because it was compiled at a time when most Americans were unaware of modern German art. Artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff lend distinction to the collection, which has been described as “a sharply focused body of work . . . a survey of German Expressionism that embraces the whole of the movement.” Mrs. Pohl bequeathed “her books and library and pictures and drawing collection” to Milwaukee-Downer College, which by the time of her death had become part of Lawrence University. A major exhibition of the collection was held in the newly completed Wriston Art Center at the time of its dedication in 1989.
Japanese Woodblock Prints Collection
The collection of Japanese woodblock prints at the Wriston Art Galleries at Lawrence University, includes a wide range of ukiyo-e artist works dating from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Most are from the 19th century, and display a variety of different subjects including Bijin-ga (images of beauties), landscapes, and akusha-e (Kabuki actors). Artists such as Chikanobu, Keisai Eisen, Hasui Kawase, Torii Kiyonaga, Toyohara Kunichika, Kunisada, Shiro Kasamatsu, Ohara Shoson, Utagawa Toyokuni, and Yoshida Hiroshi are part of this collection. In addition to these, there are a number of works from Hiroshige’s series “Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido”, “Famous Place in the Eastern Capital (Toto Meishi)”, “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo Hyakkei)” and more.
The Sepik Collection
Lawrence University's collection of masks, armbands, figures, drums, and other artifacts representing New Guinea ethnographic art came to campus in 1982 through the generosity of three alumni - G. Jack Gevaart, '55, Carol Golossey Gevaart, '58, and J. Russell Podzilni, '53. The objects, which are from an area known as the Sepik region, were part of a larger group of artifacts collected by the Center for International Cultural Exchange - a venture supported by residents of Wisconsin's Janesville-Beloit area, including the Gevaarts and Podzilni. Fifteen years ago, the center launched its collecting expeditions in collaboration with an Australian anthropologist and trader who had devoted most of his professional life to collecting, identifying, and appraising artwork from the South Pacific. With the opening of the Wriston Art Center last year, the university now is able to display the entire collection, which the Gevaarts and Podzilni donated to the anthropology department when the Center for International Cultural Exchange dissolved. Lawrence, along with other institutions such as the Smithsonian and Milwaukee Public Museum, is fortunate to have become beneficiary of such artifacts, which provide a valuable opportunity to gain insight into Sepik region's rich and varied culture.
